It's important that you regularly work on your career to continue to grow, and these days, ensure that you can find a job. It doesn't matter if you're a doctor, an electrician, a banker, or a technologist, the world seems to be regularly changing many of our jobs. Whether we need to deepen our current skills or learn a few new related ones, I think it's just prudent to continue to develop yourself as a professional.

I think it's fun as well when you can learn a new skill or two.

I ran across a post that talks about the top skills that will be in demand in 2015. There are 9 items, and while you should take this information with a grain of salt, it is an interesting list in a few ways. I would guess it's fairly representative of those areas that recruiters are having a hard time finding people, so while your SQL Server, C#, Javascript, etc. skills are still valuable, adding one or more of these might help you feel a bit more confident you could get a new job if you needed one in 2015.

PowerShell is the first skill listed, and I think it's important. If you work in the Unix world, you probably already know how to script in one of the shells, and for Windows people, PowerShell is the equivalent. Whether you manage one server or 100, this can help you more consistently handle your environment. For SQL Server people, there are some very handy uses for Powershell, especially for file type operations or DR, so I think it's worth learning.

Many of the other skills like cloud computering, O365 and Google Apps, compliance, mobile, are more buzzword driven, but that doesn't mean they're not valuable skills. Managers hire people and write checks, and if they think some of these areas are worth implementing projects in, they'll be jobs available.

The last item listed is soft skills, and if you had to pick one area to work on, this would be the one I'd recommend for most of you. Soft skills translate to any company and any position. They are more and more important these days as scarcity of jobs mean that employers have choices, and when all your candidates have similar technical skills, the things that stand out are the people that communicate better, act as team players and can build bonds with others.